Apple goes all-Retina for its 27-inch Skylake iMac refresh

Enlarge / The original 27-inch 5K iMac. The new one has a few tweaks on the inside and outside. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

A year ago Apple introduced a new Retina 5K iMac at the high end of the lineup and left everything else alone. This year, the entire lineup is getting a refresh-not only is there a new 4K model of the 21.5-inch iMac, but all of the 27-inch non-Retina iMacs are being replaced by 5K Retina models. The 27-inch models are also getting some nice internal upgrades, including quad-core Intel Skylake CPUs, new dedicated AMD Radeon GPUs, and faster PCI Express SSDs and Fusion Drive configurations.

The new 5K iMacs start at $1,799, the same starting price as the previous-generation, non-Retina iMac-that model comes with a quad-core 3.2GHz (3.6GHz Turbo) Core i5-6500, 8GB of 1867MHz DDR3 RAM, a 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive, and an AMD Radeon R9 M380 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. All of the new 27-inch iMacs also include Apple's redesigned Magic Keyboard and your choice of either a Magic Mouse 2 (included) or Magic Trackpad 2 ($50 extra).

The $1,999 configuration uses the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM, but it bumps the GPU to an AMD Radeon R9 M390 with 2GB of GDDR5 and upgrades you to a 1TB Fusion Drive. And the $2,299 model gets you 8GB of RAM with a 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) Core i5-6600, a Radeon R9 M395 with 2GB of GDDR5, and a 2TB Fusion Drive.

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